Abstract
From the middle of the thirteenth century there was a dramatic growth in the composition of treatises concerned with how a ruler should behave, a genre known as “Mirror of Princes”. The Speculum dominarum, sometime later translated into French as the Miroir des dames (“Mirror of Ladies”), was composed in Latin well into the reign of Jeanne de Navarre (1285–1305), wife of Philip the Fair (1285–1314), as a manual for correct behaviour by her Franciscan confessor, Durand de Champagne.1 I will argue that in its themes and structure it is similar to mirrors of princes, such as those written by Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and others, which deal with the various ways of administering justice to the people. This particular treatise, however, was written for a queen, and I would contend that it aimed at constructing a place for a Franciscan influence at the French court through the queen’s influence, as a contribution to political debate in Paris at the time.
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